In the South of Spain runs a river so red and so alien-looking that the Spain tourism board is marketing it as Mars on Earth. NASA scientists even came to the area to investigate the ecosystem for its similarities to the planet Mars.

Due (mostly) to the intense mining for copper, silver, gold, and other mineral in the area, the Rio Tinto is highly acidic, its water has a low oxygen content and it is made dense by the metals it carries in suspension. Its deep reddish hue is caused by the iron dissolved in the water.

Cecilia Jonsson visited the region to collect some of the wild grass that grows on the borders of the Rio Tinto. The name of that grass is Imperata cylindrica. It is a highly invasive weed and its other particularity is that it is an iron hyperaccumulator, which means that the plant literally drinks up the metal in the soil and stores high levels of it in its leaves, stems and roots.

The artist harvested 24kg of Imperata cylindrica and worked with smiths, scientists, technicians and farmers in order to extract the iron ore from the plants and use it to make an iron ring. The innovative experiment brought together the biological, the industrial, the technological and even craft to create a piece of jewellery that weights 2 grams. The project also suggests a way to reverse the contamination process while at the same time mining iron ore from the damaged environment.

I felt there were millions of artists who were making there marks, and i sort of felt the abstract expressionist said it all with abstract art in a way… I wanted to see what would happen if i was the artist who did not make my mark. I let something [the material] tell me something I did not know… It was a matter of giving up control.

So I think works of art engage, possibly, an internal memory bank that isn’t linear and it can make you see the outside reality in that way also… You can just go through the history of art that way and immediately you conjure up something that you yourself could not express, and fulfilled in each of us something we lack.

In 2007 Alison Rossiter purchased a battered box of silver gelatin print paper, stamped with an expiration date of May 1, 1946. Intending to make photograms she headed into the darkroom to make a test print. What emerged on the paper as she moved it through the developer, stop, and fix, she describes as a beautiful Vija Celmins-like graphite drawing. With passion she talks about “finding” the drawing in the tired coating of the paper, “The silver halides could not maintain their light sensitive capacity. I knew then that there was something to go and find in the midst of the deterioration and failure of the paper.” And go and find she did. The shelves of her studio are lined with thousands of packages of expired paper purchased on eBay. Exquisitely beautiful found objects in themselves, the packages display one hundred plus years of design history.

Cameraless photographic processes in art are not new. Avant-garde masters Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray were two of the first artists to make photograms in the early 20th century. Placing objects directly onto photographic paper, they created formal compositions of cast shadows, shapes, and silhouettes. This type of experimentation in the darkroom continues to resurface and to be reinvented by contemporary artists who create abstractions that rely on chance and who celebrate process. These images are often aesthetically and conceptually contrary to the exacting science of photography.

“There’s a renewed interest in hands-on types of work,” Sande-Friedman says, citing Klea McKenna’s photogram series Rain Studies, the chemigram-based work of Amanda Means, and the traveling camera obscura of John Chiara. “When we increasingly use the computer to mediate between ourselves and the natural world, there’s more desire to engage with it directly. These artists are interested in really getting inside nature—both in organic imagery and working with nature as an idea.”

Brandt’s work on Lakes and Reservoirs extended in part from experiments with salted-paper printing, but he says chemistry was more a road to an idea than the idea itself. He was also inspired by a popular story that the British landscape painter J.M.W. Turner had himself strapped to the mast of a boat in order to experience the full force of a gale before painting it. “It’s having a fuller understanding of nature when working with it,” Brandt says. Watching the way that lake water degraded print emulsions gave him a broader sense of the process of natural erosion.